Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @06:05PM
from the so-much-more-free-time dept.

jfruh writes "Pundits have been gleefully predicting the death of email for years, but nobody has really been able to explain what will replace email, especially for the medium's archiving capabilities that businesses and governments have come to rely on. It's possible that email won't vanish, but rather become invisible, one component of an integrated communication stream that will be transparent to users but still present — and useful — under the hood. It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time."

My email has been 'a conversation' since the I first used it in the early 90's. Maybe with some of the more crippled web based services people are now suffering with it's not so obvious. Stuff like Gmail feels like a step back from the threaded clients I've used for all that time, too much missing or poorly implemented.

When people ask whether email is going away I'm completely dumbfounded. It ain't broke and IMHO works better than the alternatives where absolute, instant response isn't needed. Mostly it's not noticeably slower anyway. When I desperately need a little more speed IM does a good imitation of a very poorly featured email exchange.

See, I think that email is broken, and that we've been patching it for over a decade to try to maintain usability. All the spam, all the broken clients, all the broken servers, all the phishing...it was built when there was a great deal of trust between providers, and when that trust was broken, email was broken.

Chances are your email doesn't need to be connected to the outside world. My favorite email account is my work one. It contains no spam. Just emails from my coworkers. It is a closed world of usefulness. Of course some people have to interface with customers or vendors. Maybe don't use email for that.

With more and more servers and clients every day, broken ones tend to die faster. Except huge corporate sponsored ones (yes, I'm looking at you, Outlook!).In any case, if something DID replace email someday, you'd still have broken implementations, and many of the same issues. Maybe phishing may fade, though phising is really a user/educational problem, unrelated to the protocol.

You are confusing email, the protocol, with email the communications medium. The protocol needs tightening to improve reliability and security but that has very little to do with the communications medium. Email is quite simply the electronic version of snail mail, a more formal means of communication where the sender and the recipient can keep a clear record of communications. In fact over time emails are becoming much more formal, and far more resembling old world letters than original rather informal email.

Email will continue and thrive as people will continue to require formal track able communications. It is likely that the protocol will tighten up over time.

That's not an e-mail problem, that's a communication problem. I get spam snail-mail that pretends to be important and from my insurance company. I get voicemails that start with, "This is an important message for..."

The problems with e-mail are the same problems we have with phones, texts, snail-mail and any other type of communication (photo-bombing, anyone?). Part of the population will always try to take advantage of the rest of the population. Ignore that then look at the rest.

Granted I think I've only used Thunderbird or Outlook in recent history (with some Eudora thrown in) but I've never found the conversation threading in any of the desktop clients to be as good as Gmail's. Maybe I'm missing something...

Hell not only ain't it broke, I'd say its never been better. All the major webmails now have excellent spam filters, they all have AV scanning so one doesn't have to warn users about email attachments anymore, they work on just about any device, are fast with most email arriving across services in a few minutes...what is supposed to be busted?

The only thing I see "rising" is pointless bullshit quick posts like tweets which if those I've seen are any indication are about this level of sophistication [penny-arcade.com] so I d

You can't forward the entire "conversation" to somebody, or include another person in your conversation easily when doing it in email. This is something Wave did nicely. You could add somebody to the entire thread and they can see everything from the start. With email you would have to start forwarding lots of individual emails around to bring new people up-to-speed (unless you do the horrid post-on-top thing most MS users do).

I think you are right, though the key differentiator is not chatty vs. discrete messages. Chat done right can solve a number of problems that email has:

- Email sucks as an archive. It's fine to store personal emails just for yourself, but when you dig deep and assess how much critical corporate knowledge is locked away in this multitude of personal archives of all employees, you'll be in for a shock. A Twitter-like chat system for corporations (like Yammer) will retain that knowledge for the right group, including its future members. I find that only a small part of my conversation is actually really private between me and someone else. Most of it will be relevant for my team, for another team, for a special interest group within the company, or for the company as a whole. In a corporate Twitter, asking for knowledge is automatically the same as sharing it, as soon as an answer is given. In email, any answer is lost for everyone but yourself.

- Email is fine for communicating 1 to 1 or 1 to many, but it is a poor vehicle for many-to-many conversations. Chat systems (again citing Yammer as an example... by the way I have nothing to do with Yammer except that my current client uses it) can solve this by having private, ad-hoc chat groups in which participants can be invited or drop out as needed. New joiners will see a clear, linear history of what has already been discussed, instead of a steaming pile of replies-to-replies-to-replies in multiple sub-threads, all intertwined in a single email exchange.

In our team, we've tried sticking to the rule that forbids the use of email for anything that will still be relevant one week from the day of sending. The idea is that any such messages belong to the corporate memory, which means email is out as a vehicle for storing it. Instead, people use Yammer or email links to documents stored in a central repository. It worked out quite well, both improving recall from our corporate memory, keeping everyone on the same page and aware of each others' work, and improving the quality of discussions by electronic means. But we too found that it is extremely hard to break the email habit. One thing that email still has going for it in the corporation is that everyone has it, and everyone is expected to read it several times a day. You might get told of for missing an important email, but being told off for missing an important discussion on some social media thingy? We're not quite there yet.

In most organizations, the whole email reply chain exists so that workerbees can summon the higher authorities. "I'm gunna cc: my boss!" "Now you've done it, I'm cc:ing my boss' boss!". The bosses can then digest the conversation and come to a decision at their leisure. I have no idea how that would work with a chat/IM system.

We've had good luck using Basecamp; it is essentially email except with a web interface to locate previous conversations, documents, etc.

Yes, that will work well... until Yammer, etc, falls out of use and all of a sudden your "corporate memory" is locked behind an inaccessible gateway or simply lost forever due to obsolescence. I'd rather setup my own corporate NNTP server if I was concerned about long-term storage and retrieval. If I was concerned about ease of use, a slick interface, and a heavy dose of cachet, I might choose... Yammer.

And you're confusing the e-mail GUI with "e-mail". You're forgetting the large stack of protocols and sof

What the hell? A MDA (Mail Delivery Agent, like sendmail or postfix) can be configured to save a copy of each Email your employees send to a central archive. Also you have Mailing Lists for Many to Many communications.

It's really funny how a bunch of "hippies" aka Open Source Developer (go to any project like Groovy, Apache projects, Linux, etc) can solve all the "disadvantages" of Email you complain about.

Archive: just configure your MDA so send each email send or received to a central email archive server

..I think email is going to stick around for a long time, probably forever, without merging with instant messaging. IM is great for low-latency conversations, but there is more to communication than that.

I was agreeing with this...hence me saying "If anything". Apparently my attempts to express skepticism of the OP (Email is going away soon) were not properly communicated...

It's funny how the fax machine just refuses to die to dignity. My sister-in-law works as a liason between group insurers and a major hospital in Wisconsin, and she faxes shit daily. Comes in handy whenever we need to fax something in our personal lives, which is about once every 3 years.

I was under the impression that medical records were going electronic, but she tells me she still generates at least a ream of paper a week, and she works alongside hundreds of people. I can't even imagine what they were using before...

My thoughts, exactly. There might be a different PROTOCOL, but there will ALWAYS be email. I contact my friends via email (because not everything is appropriate for IM or TXT), every website requires it for validation and registration. And, most importantly, I go through hundreds (500-ish) of emails a day at work just for our engineering/dev aliases and dealing directly with our clients. Quite simply, without email, I wouldn't remain in contact with all the people I have where they're good friends, but not people I talk to every week or even every month. And what we do for a living would absolutely not work.

As long as mid level execs feel that email is an instant, unlimited capacity communication channel that saves everything for ever but is still secure and reliable with 24/7 5-9's uptime, email will be around.

I've been waiting to kill email for years, and they won't let me do it.

One thing that gets much better results then emailing each other is walking up to their desk (without sending a meeting request, mind you) and talk to them. Yes! In person.

Instead of doing the 20 questions (meaning 20 mails) I have a conversation. Sometimes people are too far away (e.g. in another country) and then I call them. On the phone. We have a conversation of 5-15 minutes and we are BOTH clear what we want and need.

Sure, sometimes we need a trail and one send an email like: According to our conversa

...and often the conversation is to organise meetings of groups of people. Groups that may first be simultaneously available at the time you arrange. That's true even in offices. I'll agree that automatically picking email for every conversation in a workplace is insane though.

Phone calls and personal meetings are not always interchangeable with email, they serve different, if overlapping purposes.

Yeah, that works real well for a topic that is important but has no particular urgency with a colleague who is busy doing something that is both important and urgent. Of course the fact that whatever you discuss is subject to the interpretation and memory of the people involved in the conversations means that it is really useful as well.
Having said that, there are definitely many exchanges of information that take place by email that should take place in person. On the other hand there are many exchanges o

Yep. I've worked in two "paperless offices" so far, and what happened was that people ended up having to print out everything anyway. For one thing, it's easier to get someone to sign a sheet of paper in blue ink and just tuck it away in an HR folder than it is to implement safe digital signatures most places. If you're having a discussion about a complex help desk ticket, and you want someone to take a look at the specific ticket but it's nearly identical to twelve other tickets, you have to write down

My buddy works in a factory that makes furniture. Guess what? They prefer iPads to the old notepads. It has reduced duplication of effort and sped up the entire workflow process by automating it. No need to wait until your floor check run (two or more hours) is over before heading back into the offices to get the data entered. It's all done from the floor.

Keep on trying to live out the old style. If it's not broke, fix it anyway because there's a much better way.

Paperless Offices work great. I have worked in one for 6 years. I print one document out a year that I then sign and fax to my consulting firms HR department. The client is an insurance company. The really experienced people bring out photos of what the place looked like before they stated going paperless some 15 to 20 years ago. Desks after desk covered in folders filled with paper. They would show us conference rooms that used to be storage for filing cabinets. The place was dirty with paper. Paperless for an insurance company means the following. When you buy insurance from an agent the agent types your info into a computer. When you get in a accident the claim handler pulls up that information and adds more information to the database. At no point is any paper produced internally. Paper leaves the company in the form of bills, policy documents, and ads. Paper comes in the system via mail from police departments, vendors, and policy holders. This paper is given to a data entry person and inputted into the database. It may get scanned. If the company is not legally required to hang on to it the paper is trashed. This is what paperless office means.

Mostly because people are printing out e-mails to take them to meetings.

The iPad does more for the paperless office vision than all other inventions of the past 10 years combined. The one thing it doesn't allow for is spreading out all your stuff in front of you to look important (managers) or get an overview (non-managers).

Is it defined as messages sent via SMTP? Or just electronic messages?There was email before SMTP, there will be email after SMTP. Messages between two users on a BBS was email, messages between a couple of users on facebook is email. So, no, it won't go away.

I think e-mail would be defined as having two features, similar to the postal service. In a properly configured system, a message would never be lost. It would either be delivered or returned to the sender. It would also allow routing through multiple systems (and not necessarily TCP/IP ones) in order to arrive at its destination.

Instant messaging doesn't count as e-mail because most IM systems don't guarantee delivery, so you're lucky if your failed message doesn't get lost forever. They are also ce

Facebook, Google Wave, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo messenger.. services like these come and go, the SMTP email stays. More importantly email is an established open standard and it is part of the very blueprint of the Internet, the RFCs. And unlike Facebook or Google services, email is not controlled by some messages monetizing 3rd parties.

E-mail will replace regular mail. It's been a slow process, but the Post Office (in the US and Britain; I can't speak for other countries) is starting to cut back; The majority of what is being sent out are physical goods and junk mail (advertising). Many people here have switched to online bill pay, and most banks offer automatic payment if the company (rarely) doesn't do bill to credit card.

Party lines gave way to single user land lines, and single user landlines gave way to cell phones. Cell phones are now giving way to text-based near realtime communication like text messages. And cell phones will eventually transition to packet-switched radio communications using VoIP and QoS.

The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.

The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.

What is slowing it down is the massive cost of the infrastructure that needs to be amortized. Deployed 3G equipment is five years old. Building out literally tens of thousands of sites costs a lot of capitol and a whole lot o

I never understood Wave. And I think that was typical of the problem Google had with it - no one really knew what the main idea was. I understood a few key things it could do, which were cool, but I am not sure if it was ahead of its time or if it just really was an ill defined mish mosh of concepts.

Wave was an excellent tool. We used it intensely, and it was great. We love to rganize trips and hikes in the desert. There is a core of people that almost always joins and several others that come in every so often. It was great to have a tool that lets add people, organize, tidy up, add maps, lists, links, polls etc etc. It was possible to work together at the same time and it would highlight the new or unread areas and who modified them. Doing the same over email + a shared Google Doc Spreadsheet now is

I think that "wiki" aspect of Wave was one of the things that made people who got it, like it, but there were so many other things like the way it would keep track of which bits of the wave you had read, draw your attention to new bits, allow you to embed active forms and gadgets, etc. And the ability to see all simultaneous edits, with no exclusive locking, was superior to most wiki software which will, if you are lucky, let you know if someone else is editing the page before you edit it yourself.

That's retarded. I work for a company that has a massive deployment (not to mention, development investment) in tele-presence. Even we don't use it. We communicate by IM and email and we conduct our meetings not with telepresence but by email. And I certainly don't help our clients via "videomail". I communicate with them via email (or phone on occasion) as per their preference.

Let's take a proven, non-centralized, robust, simple, optionally private, easily implemented, open standard that anyone implement from the RFCs, and anyone can run on their very own computer, and replace it with something centrally controlled, ideally by the UN, US, EU, or Coast Guard, proprietary, make it that people cannot reasonably run their own servers, or implement it from scratch. Bonus points if it can be another vector to deliver advertizements to eyeballs, and tightly controlled so those ads cannot be blocked by end users.

That should fit pretty well with the direction the internet has been going.

Haven't spam and spam countermeasures already made the effort of running your own mailserver unreasonable? At least I've heard that you'll be basically blocked either by default or after a while.

Add to that malware which just loves the idea of a spare mailserver whose owner works elsewhere most of the time and the fact that it's hard to even get ONE static IP these days and suddenly the current system is already the domain of large organizations (and a few super-nerds who are there mostly through inertia.)

I constantly harass my friends to stop contacting me via facebook (which I enjoy for other reasons) and just use email instead. I can keep all my messages centralized, filed, and secured. The FB messaging service is, of course, a complete joke. But even if it was brilliantly designed and my privacy fears allayed, what happens when FB disappears and the next big thing comes along? Are all those messages gone? Will there be a way to export them in an open format? Somehow I doubt it.

I don't email directly anymore, I post on G+, recipients receive it in whatever means they favor, email, text notice, online, G+ account, whatever. If they don't have a google account, it goes to their email.

So yeah, email has become transparent to me. I receive next to no correspondence through it.

That is the beauty of improved technology, making my life easier. It's been so horrible since we've moved away from landline phones and two standard methods of contact became mail/phone/fax/mobile/voicemail/SMS/email/web contact form/Twitter and who knows through which of those you'd get a response.

I don't email directly anymore, I post on G+, recipients receive it in whatever means they favor, email, text notice, online, G+ account, whatever. If they don't have a google account, it goes to their email.

What happens if Google decides they don't like you and you get banned from their service?

One of the things I really like about email, and it may at least be partially true unless your with gmail or hotmail, that you know no one is sniffing through your data. I know that I may dillusional, but at least I'm pretty sure that marketing guys won't be filtering my email looking for ways to sell me things they think i'll want. I don't understand all these people that are willing to give up all their information for coupons and discounts. I guess i'm just old.

Google didn't pull the plug on Wave because it didn't work, it just didn't fit into their business model. The wave protocol is federated, while all other Google services are centralized, Google relies upon all traffic coming through them for skimming revenue from their users. This is why they killed wave and even when it was style in hype mode refused to release a user installable client (free or otherwise).
However, the ideas behind wave, most importantly that it allows rich real-time communication with

"integrated communication stream"? Is this the latest in manager-speak bullshit? That being said, there are some needs that today's email, even with great interfaces like gmail, either doesn't meet or meets awkwardly and with annoying hacks. Group discussions still have the tendency to turn into a clusterfuck, even with gmail-style nice thread view. And it would be nice if I could, say, create a category of "XXX class homework 4 submissions" and give some way for my students to submit directly to that categ

And it would be nice if I could, say, create a category of "XXX class homework 4 submissions" and give some way for my students to submit directly to that category so I don't have to manually assign labels to all 45 submissions, and maybe share all submissions with the other TA's (the only alternative for me being blackboard, and I refuse to rely on that pile of bloated rotting carcasses)...

Add + and a label to your email address before the @ sign. Filter based on this (maybe forward to an email list or some such). I honestly don't understand why more people don't know about this. Or go and create your own mailing list with its own address - again possible with minimal hassle.

All these other schemes tend to cluster around particular servers or owned infrastructure. Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Google's stuff, etc live and die on the company supporting it. If Google had made good on their promises and released their federated Wave servers, that might have been one launching point where something new could have come around. (Wave in and of itself didn't seem that great, but offered an reasonable point of more complex integration.)

A system whereby you enclose a message and propose a recipient or recipients,and both sender and recipient have copies that can be saved. I can't see that,going away entirely, without something that addresses everything that emailcan do AND fix everything it can't do, or does poorly.

As far as mainstream for the 'everyman', it has already gone away folks.You just haven't realized it yet.

I think the older generation like myself still prefer email to texting. Personally, I like email because an immediate response is not expected. I'm much funnier when I have time to think about it.;-)

I'm also less likely to say something I'll regret later and there is a record. In my opinion there will always be room for that type of communication.

Younger people seem to prefer texting or Skype because communication is more real-time and it's easier to include more people. It also allows them to be braver than they would be over the phone. This is not always good.

While I'm old and I like my email, the one good thing about IM-like systems is that group chats easily contain their context in the scrollback, and when dealing with professionals, can be kept concise and on-topic with a fairly large number of participants. Email lists tend toward late responses and thread fragmentation given the same usage scenario.

Now that I thought about it for a couple of minutes, the future of e-mail consists solely of the X-Thread-Id header, which will finally allow to properly sort the friggin' archives. A quick google says that X-Thread-Id has already been proposed by someone in '09!

Once implemented, it will make e-mail 'feature-complete', which translates into english roughly as 'old, boring and forgotten'. After that it will be mostly impossible to get work

Its a bit like those History/NATGEO programs about 'Life After People' - the whole question is, what happened to the people will determine what it would look like.The main thing that will cause the end of email is a disaster that would wipe out civilization. (Gamma Ray Burst,, dinosaur killer asteroid, supervolcano, genetically engineered plague, or Vogon Constructor fleet etc.

Who's been predicting the death of email for years? I haven't heard of anything like that, nor have I noticed any reduction in the usage of email.On the contrary, with smartphones, I've noticed IM and email are slowly replacing SMSs.

Email is actually an excellent form of communication. It's so flexible that every realtime and async messaging system could be usefully transacted over email (and often is), at least every message could use the email data formats (Subject/To/From/Cc/Bcc/Attachment/Body fields, MIME headers, X-whatever arbitrary tuples, etc). In fact every message sent with at least one human endpoint should be transcribable into RFC822/etc emails as a test of its utility and completeness. I had a friend in the 1990s who firmly believed TCP/IP should be restandardized with every packet required to be formatted as a separate email. That's too far (unless packets were bigger), but not wholly wrongheaded.

I hope email never goes away. I do hope that email gets much better message databases and presentation UIs, better integration with non-email messaging (in the same, integrated messaging systems). For example I'd like my every Slashdot post (and other Web transactions) to be indexed in my own storage in email format, and I'd like my emails to be able to HTTP POST/GET/PUT from my MUA. I hope that email finally gets better standardized structure of message bodies, especially for quoting by pointer with attribution, and more nonlinear structures of message sequences. Especially branching and quoting multiple previous generation messages, as well as from separate threads, in a single reply, which maintain coherence among threads.

But that's just better email, not post-email. More and better email would make the world a better place. I hope it does.

Low usage by 18-24 year olds may be due to heavy unemployment in that group. Social networking is fine for getting people together to go out, but if you have to organize anything complex, you need a more persistent medium. Try organizing something more complex than meeting at a bar over SMS. Even trying to organize something over Facebook is tough. It's fine for casual chat, but the "everything scrolls off" approach is no good when there are actual tasks to do and track.

For big, complex, highly structured projects, there are decent collaboration tools. Open source projects have had forums systems coupled to bug trackers coupled to source code management for years. There are comparable systems for specific problems, like Autodesk Vault for mechanical engineers and Alienbrain for game developers. Tools for medium-sized loose collaboration have been built, but haven't developed big followings. (Google Wave was supposed to be usable for that.) Those still tend to be run via e-mail.

There's also the problem that single-source "cloud" services tend to go away after a few years. If you were using Google Wave for anything important, you were screwed. This sounds like a case for an open source project, but open source will never get "user friendly" right.

what do facebook, myspace, twitter, google plus, blogspot, linkedin, flickr, skype, itunes, msn (and other) instant messengers, youtube, and just about every other web service (free and subscription-based) have in common?

E-mail will not go away as long as the Internet maintains its structure where no single entity controls it.

Think about it: What do you need in order to sign up for a Facebook, Twitter, Steam, or pretty much any online account? An e-mail address.

Right now the only truly guaranteed way two random people online can contact each other is e-mail. Not everyone has a Facebook account. Not everyone is on Twitter, or on AIM. But everyone online has an e-mail address, even if they don't use it very much, because you NEED one to sign up for these services!:)